Thomas Sayers Ellis

Poet, photographer, and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has published, both poems and photographs, in numerous magazines and journals, including The Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, The Sun, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary Free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. In 2023, TSE was named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida. He writes a bi-monthly column for The Artisan Magazine and his most recent book is Paradise Paradise Layered. In 2024, a solo exhibition was held at The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA) in Tampa. View the exhibition: https://spmop.org/online-exhibitions